SMASH PATRIARCHY: Oklahoma: Lesbian couple ‘beat one woman’s 5-year-old son with a HAMMER, duct-taped his eyes and kicked him in the groin until he bled and suffered two strokes’. “According to police, the horrific abuse went on for several months.”

Related: Califorina: “Two Salinas women accused of torturing, starving, and chaining up an 8-year-old girl inside their house on Russell Road were found guilty by a jury.” “Craig and Deanda were the legal guardians.” (Moreover, “Deanda and Craig were scheduled to be married . . . according to an online gift registry.”)

Related: Puffington Host: Child Abuse Rate At Zero Percent In Lesbian Households, New Report Finds. “The paper found that none of the 78 NLLFS adolescents reports having ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver.”

Why the disconnect? See Mark Regnerus, “Lesbian Mothers’ Children: Is it time to retire the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study?” (paragraph breaks added):

My misgivings are due to the great likelihood that the data sources — the respondents themselves — have been increasingly compromised, placing the very validity and reliability of the data in question. How so? The NLLFS employs a convenience sample, recruited entirely from announcements posted “at lesbian events, in women’s bookstores, and in lesbian newspapers” in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

As the late family sociologist Steven Nock warned [PDF], the level of sample bias such an approach introduces is significant. The lesbian parents whose children are being studied are whiter (94 percent), more educated (67 percent college graduates), of higher socioeconomic status (82 percent held professional or managerial positions), and more politically motivated than lesbians who do not frequent such “events” or bookstores, or who live in cities like San Antonio or Kansas City, or in smaller towns across the country. (Aren’t they important, too?) Anything that is correlated with educational attainment, for example — better health, more deliberative parenting, greater access to social capital and educational opportunities for children — will be biased in analyses.

Any claims about a population (in this case, American lesbian parents) based on a subgroup that does not represent the whole will be distorted, since its sample is far less diverse (given what we know about it) than a representative sample would be. Indeed, there’s nothing “national” about the NLLFS.